Ask HN: Must you have no life, at least early on, to run a successful startup?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11277164

by jimsojim • 10 years ago

64 54 10 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

meritt• 10 years ago

Define life.

You absolutely need to work hard and devote yourself but that doesn't mean you cannot have a life.

It might not be the 9-5 "life" all your friends are enjoying but how about sacrificing 5-10 years of hard work building something amazing in exchange for an early retirement while everyone else settles in for next 40-50 years?>

forgetsusername• 10 years ago

The number of people who get to retire after five years because of startup success is minuscule, dominated by the number of people who work hard for 5-10 years and end up with not much more than grey hair to show.

freyr• 10 years ago

When giving or seeking career advice, people want to frame things in terms of absolutes.

There are many paths to a successful business. Some successful people sacrificed their families, health, relationships, etc., and others didn't. Some unsuccessful people also sacrificed their lives in pursuit of success.

onion2k• 10 years ago

There aren't any rules. You can have a life outside of your startup if you want one. Plenty of people do.

The reasons why people say you can't have one are two-fold. There's a very good, very valid reason, and there's a very bad, toxic-to-your-business reason.

The bad reason is that people who start companies are very competitive. This means they feel they have to be seen doing more, whether it's working longer hours, making more calls, writing more code, going to more networking events, and so on. Sometimes this produces value for their business, but more often it's just "busy work" that isn't actually adding anything useful - going to a networking event and only talking to people you already know is a good example. People who do that sort of thing are the ones who brag about putting in 80 hours a week. Don't emulate those founders.

The good reason to cast your life aside is that very often a startup is doing something ambitious that takes a lot of work to get off the ground, but only has funding to last 6 months. Consequently everything has to be done in that time, which leads to putting in loooooong days. If you have a low burn rate and a long time you can afford to go slowly.

If you take an honest look at the hours people are putting in and realise that half of it could have been done better, or automated away, or just not have been done in the first place, then you'll understand why "number of hours worked" is a pretty awful measure of effort.

thenomad• 10 years ago

Also worth noting that most people haven't read the various studies on productivity against hours worked, and thus just assume - reasonably enough, but usually incorrectly - that over six months, you'll get twice as much work done on 80 hours a week as 40 hours a week.

And working that much feels like you're being very productive.

patrics123• 10 years ago

Just read this and I think it matches quite well: http://plumshell.com/2016/03/10/work-for-only-3-hours-a-day-...

We are running our business for ~3yrs now and just realized in the last few months that none of the all-nighters or skipped holidays actually made a difference in the end. So just from my personal experience I'd say you should actively plan and maintain a private life from the get-go - If you don't you are not "better" then another person who is just working to finally reach retirement...

Tempest1981• 10 years ago

It's hard to have balance when you feel that you're changing the world... and when everyone around you is just as crazy/passionate.

mdnormy• 10 years ago

Define "successful startup"?

Countless of people have started small and stayed small. I think it always been like that traditionally. You start a business, you grow it till its big enough to serve your niche market, and you pull in few million every year for the rest of your career life without much effort.

I used to work in manufacturing industry and this model is more prevalent in their whole supply chain. You could own 1 factory with less than 20 staff, producing 1 type of component(bolt/glue/bracket etc) and be done with it.

However, if you define successful startup, as multi-million dollar revenue organization, that's another story.

charlesdm3• 10 years ago

Seriously, what is better than that? Having a cashcow that will generate you a few million a year, so you can actually live/enjoy life?

sumedh• 10 years ago

Some people are not happy with just a few million, they want more.

AndrewKemendo4• 10 years ago

Power

paulasmuth• 10 years ago

Revenue != Income. Gross profit (before paying any taxes) will probably be a fairly small percentage of turnover in manufacturing - you have to pay employees, purchase supplies, etc...

EDIT: just looked it up and most of "industry weeks"'s Top 50 manufacturing companies seem to have profit margins in the 10% range: http://www.industryweek.com/resources/iw50best/2015/48

nelb• 10 years ago

I suspect the original poster may have meant a startup that is on a mission. Perhaps not necessarily to build a business.

See: http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html - the essence being that a startup is designed to grow fast, and have an impact beyond simply enriching the founders (not that that is a bad outcome either).

jasode5• 10 years ago

You may not realize this but you're asking a question a "true" startup entrepreneur doesn't think to ask.

Or to put it another way, a passionate entrepreneur would ask the opposite question in some zen philosophy forum, "Must I spend time away from my startup so I appear to have a balanced life?"

The true entrepreneurs are obsessed with their startup. They don't want to spend time shooting the breeze drinking beers with their buddies. They don't want to sit still on the beach staring at the ocean. (At least at the early stage, but maybe later when they're Bill Gates' age.) They'd rather program one more feature on that web page. The startup work is not an "obligation". The business startup work is who they are. These types of passionate people are rare and most people really can't relate to the startup founders' focus.

The obsession and singular focus on startup work is similar to musicians' obsessions with composition, athletes with sports, etc.

Sure, you'll want to hear an answer of "no you don't have to give up your life" and many people will give you that answer but realize that you're competing with entrepreneurs who don't even ask it. The startup is their life and therefore, there is nothing to "give up" when they're working on it all the time.

EDIT to the downvoters: can you list examples of "successful startups" as that phrase is understood by the HN readers where the founders work 40 hours per week so they could have a "balanced life" outside of their business? Is there a YC company in the portfolio where founders are working just 40 hours? Did I misunderstand what the poster is asking? Isn't he asking about founders who run the startup and not the line employees?

mtmail3• 10 years ago

This reads like a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman argument. There are plenty of startup entrepreneurs who don't have that singular focus or obsession and can still create a successful company.

jasode5• 10 years ago

There are plenty of startup entrepreneurs who don't have that singular focus or obsession and can still create a successful company.

Who would that be that HN is familiar with? HN is familiar with startup founders like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, M Zuckerberg, etc. Their ability to outwork everyone else with 80+ hours/week is well-known and constantly repeated in business reporting.

Who are the 40-hour a week startup founders that HN can use as role models? If there are "plenty", I don't know a single one. (The original HN question asker apparently doesn't know them either because he wouldn't ask the question if he did.)

I would hope HN posters don't speak abstractly. Instead, speak concretely and tell us who those real people are so we can emulate them.

tim333• 10 years ago

examples of "successful startups" as that phrase is understood by the HN readers where the founders work 40 hours per week

Plentyoffish "In 2008, Frind told The New York Times that his website's net profits were about $10 million a year and that he worked only about 10 hours a week." Sold for $575 million.

Fog Creek "We believe that the way to be most productive is to work normal 40-hour weeks." Built Trello which I think would count as an HN startup.

jasode5• 10 years ago

I'm familiar with Plentyoffish and his 10 hours/week. However, one has to be careful with Markus Frind's self-reported "hours worked" because many people who are passionate about their projects don't count all related tasks as "work". He's probably not lying but outsiders auditing his time with a hidden camera may not conclude it to be just 10 hours. Also, his "10-hours" seems to describe his steady-state at the 5-year mark and not what he was doing in his first 6 months learning ASP.NET.

To put 10 hours a week in perspective, think of creating a web startup and trying to discipline yourself to work less than five 2-hour days because the Plentyoffish guy did it. It's not hard to imagine that a single SSL misconfiguration or typo in an XML config file could have you chasing a mystery bug like that for 12 hours straight. Or an unexpected spike of traffic has you scrambling in the AWS control panel but the issue cascaded to a bunch of other processes that takes days to get things back under control. Or your initial customers want a new feature but your "programming budget" is 10 hours of programming time. Stack just a few of those unexpected crisis together and all of a sudden you're already at 50+ hours for the week. A startup is an endless barrage of those unexpected fires hitting you relentlessly.

As for Trello, as far as I know, it's not profitable yet (which some folks consider a factor for "success"). Also, the "we believe 40 hours" may be a sentiment J Spolsky espouses for his workers but he (the founder) may not be necessarily constraining himself to that.

EliRivers• 10 years ago

"successful startups" as that phrase is understood by the HN readers

I think that might be the problem here. I went to school with a guy who founded a taxi company; he never worked silly hours, but that's not a "successful startup" as understood by HN readers.

jamescun• 10 years ago

I was co-founder of a (YC-backed) startup for 4 years until we were forced to close, so I don't know if you can define us as "successful".

Anecdotally speaking, I started off working with no life. There is a lot to be said for time periods where you shut out all else and just focus on your business, in fact the YC programme gave good impetus to only "write code, speak to customers or exercise". However doing this for extended periods is a great way to burn out.

Initially any time I took off I felt incredibly guilty about. I however came to the realisation that stepping away, even just for an evening to see friends, allowed me to recharge my batteries and I was able to recoup the lost time and then some.

A company is only really the sum of its people, and if those people aren't firing on all cylinders then it will become apparent. In short, lead a balanced life.

zebra• 10 years ago

As I like to say, building medium to big project is like running marathon and not a sprint, because at the moment when you have no air and you are exhausted you will have to stop. And a half-build project is useless opposed to a late project that works. Better late than never.

rcarrigan87• 10 years ago

The guilt when you do take a break is definitely one of the hardest things to get past. Very hard to truly unplug even if you've stepped away from your computer to go out with friends.

danmaz74• 10 years ago

Why on Earth would somebody downvote this? Unfortunately, this is how many people feel when you have lots of responsibilities to many other people.

percept• 10 years ago

Perhaps rest should be the fourth leg of that platform, made explicit.

AndrewKemendo4• 10 years ago

Probably depends on what you are trying to do.

The reality is that if you are a small team trying to take on a huge market and maybe creating new technology while other major companies are trying to so the same then you need to get a better solution into the market faster.

So can you do that and also have "a life" however defined?

On the other hand if you have some niche of a niche kubernetes plugin for WebGL and are a team of two college students with no overhead. Yes you probably can.

chuhnk• 10 years ago

I'm building something at the moment. I previously worked at a couple startups and a large tech company. I'm the kind of person who goes all out until burn out. Not really healthy behaviour. I've realised that building my own thing is a decade long journey and as much as I want things to be done yesterday I cannot forget to live my life. I don't want 10 years to pass by and have missed out on all the other experiences I could be having. It took me a while to figure it out, to spend time reading, go to the gym, meet friends for lunch and even take days off writing code. It really is a marathon and while it's important to be focused the worst thing would be to look back and regret not living.

rl33• 10 years ago

While I can't speak to the successful part, I'm just over two years into my current project and haven't launched nor applied to YC yet.

If I had more money I'd definitely maintain way more of a life than I do now while continuing to work on my startup. Granted, I didn't really have much of a life prior anyways (remote job coupled with high expenses), so maybe that makes it easier since I'm used to it.

The timescale might seem crazy, but it's incredible what time does for your ideation and strategy. When I first started, my plan was basically a mid-sized SaaS business. Over the years both internal and external forces evolved that into a methodical blueprint for a company on the order of Magic Leap. Six months in I figured out trying to charge money for the product was probably suicide. Six months after that came the start of a radical shift to a far more ambitious plan that built off the original in a very natural way. Had I artificially constrained myself to a fixed time window, or otherwise quit, I'd have never discovered any of that.

The whole thing is very much like an obsession, something that occupies virtually all of your idle thought. Kind of like a nagging splinter in your mind's eye where you can see precisely what you want, the only challenge being to make it manifest.

Taking a fat paycheck as a software developer and everything that comes with it has always been tempting, especially with hindsight—but I know that the second I do it will be the end of my project. Giving up on that would be unbearable, worse than death—at least until I've seen it through regardless of the outcome.

Melodramatic narrative aside, to answer the OP's question—no, I don't think you must have no life to do a startup, and it's even preferable that you have one. For most people, the reality is just that time or financial constraints conspire to ensure that they don't.

sethammons• 10 years ago

How long until you had any mentionable cash flow? Or are you still floating on savings? Two years of lost cash flow for me would be impossible, not to mention, if somehow entirely saved, would more than pay off my mortgage

rl33• 10 years ago

Mostly savings with a bit of freelancing on the side. The upshot of no life is it's at least compatible with cheap living.

justinlaing• 10 years ago

2 years in and you haven't launched? You need to launch. Without real feedback how do you know if you are building something people actually want?

rl33• 10 years ago

2 years in and you haven't launched?

It wasn't the original plan, but things change. You often don't know what you don't know when you first set down a path. Sometimes the bar for a proper MVP is beyond reach without a team. It can take a long time to realize that.

Without real feedback how do you know if you are building something people actually want?

Good question. I've watched several companies come into existence in that time, and also watched several established companies add similar features to their products. Every time this happens it's both well received by users while at the same time revealing a larger trend. Each represents a piece of the same puzzle, it's just that nobody has put them together yet.

I'm also scratching my own itch in terms of what I'm building, so that's a plus. Fortunately it seems to be an itch a lot of people have.

yesimahuman• 10 years ago

The difficult, and often brutal reality of startups is that success isn't a direct result of how hard you work. There are no rules.

bliti2• 10 years ago

One thing that improved quality of life was for me to define success. Ask yourself: What do you want? I wasn't smart enough to come up with that question, it was a friend who asked me point blank. Took me about a year to be able to answer it. But things are now much better and I have a more positive outlook for the future.

Businesses come and go. So does money. But you are not eternal. Figure out what you want and then work backwards from the end goal to the present. Set yourself small goals. Be patient. Learn to forgive yourself for mistakes l. And above all, just try to be happy.

Must you have no life to run a successful business? No, but you must make sure to have a life. Whether you have a business or not.

Best of luck OP!

erikstarck• 10 years ago

Yes! Me and my cofounder ask each other two questions each day:

1. What did we learn today?

2. How do we (as a company) want to grow?

The answer to the last one means asking "what type of company do we want to build?" and that in turn means asking the much deeper question "what life do we want to design?".

An old friend said that becoming an entrepreneur is all about taking control of your own life. This is true. As an entrepreneur, you have it in your hand to not only design the way the company you're building will work but also what your own life should be like.

bliti2• 10 years ago

It is definitely taking control of your life. That does mean that you and only you are responsible for all events. Not everyone is ready to deal with that. It is sometimes difficult. Being forgiving towards yourself goes a long way. Also, when you take control of your life you also take control of the life of others. People will depend on you. Defining how much is really important. Don't have people depend solely on you. Work with them to softly nudge them towards independence.

jkot• 10 years ago

No life? You work on what you love, I would say thats pretty good.

WA• 10 years ago

If you mean startup in the sense of VC-backed with the goal of maximum growth and market penetration: Probably yes.

If you rather want to do your own thing, I always liked the rule of thumb from the book "Start Small Stay Small". Put 100 hours into the product and 100 hours into marketing. You can do this in a month or two and then you'll see if it works or not – and more importantly: You will see if you like working on this thing or not.

iolothebard• 10 years ago

Depends on how much capital you have and how paranoid you are about failure. So, yes.

lazyjones• 10 years ago

Short answer: it depends on your personality and the type of startup.

Long answer: My startup (founded in 2000, sold in 2014, still going strong) took a huge toll on my personal life, but it was a 24/7 operation (a website), I was both CEO and lead programmer/CTO and I'm terrible at delegating work and inspiring responsibility in people. Also, web technologies did tend to fall apart more easily back then and my experience with that was limited.

In hindsight, all of these factors contributed to the (largely unnecessary) 100-hour-weeks I pulled in the first couple of years. So, brief advice: if your startup is a 24/7 operation (it doesn't have to be, there's plenty of other opportunities), you will likely be putting out fires around the clock. If you can, hire reliable people early on who can do this for you and put your mind at ease. You will be thinking about your startup a lot either way, but you can surely do that while enjoying your weekend trips or whatever.

pmoney• 10 years ago

It's tough. You want to work all day and all night. You think that if you take just a moment away from it that it will falter. Not the case. I started out that way, but I have found that even if you take the time to eat dinner with family, it's that time that helps you recharge and regroup. That is the most important time as it allows you to reflect. Without it, you work tirelessly and arguably are less efficient because you haven't taken the necessary breaks. Your brain can only process so much. Take the breaks. Go get ice cream. Go run. Go lift. Go to a bar. For God's sake, go do something that's not work-related. Then, come back and work. Unless you're drunk, then sleep. Just take time away from it.

normalist• 10 years ago

Well there is nothing glamorous about startups. It might seem this way initially, with fixie bikes hanged on exposed brick walls, and programmers somehow managing peak states in a noisy open plan office. (They should be hermetically sealed off). Employees apparently multitasking to look busy...Multitasking is an illusion propagated by the media, and it's actually impossible to multitask without performance suffering. Also see: banning mobile phone use whilst driving. A more ample question is: "must you have a life to...". It starts making sense when the natural rhythm of your own life is carried on into the startup. Ottherwise you're falling victim of the great illusion of startup glamour...

muzani• 10 years ago

I think there's a saying in this community - work on a startup that a few people really want, rather than something a lot of people kinda want a little.

That would also apply to having a "life". Live your life in a way that a few people will greatly love you and miss you. Rather than spend time with a lot of people who kinda enjoy your company a little.

There's certainly enough time in an early stage startup to treat your closest people well. I have a great lunch with my wife all the time. I bathe my daughter, play bubbles, and dance with her. I mentor young entrepreneurs.

Do things that people will remember you for after you're dead. Or at least the things they'll remember 5 years from now.

Ask HN: Must you have no life, at least early on, to run a successful startup?

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